Bronze Age Italians | The Early Romans and Their Ancestors | Dr. Emma Blake

When the Romans conquered Italy. It was a very impressive feat. But, it was made a lot easier by the fact that the Italian peninsula was entirely fragmented into different regional groups. And these groups couldn't coordinate and build a unified front against the threat of this one city of Rome. And so the Romans were able to go in and pick off these groups one at a time. This question of where these regional groups came from and how they arose has been a very, an ongoing interest to classical historians studying early Italy. And the job of identifying the origins of these groups is not an easy one. These groups had names that had been given to them by the Greek colonists who had come and settled in the Western Mediterranean several centuries earlier. And some of them had their own languages, and they had their own identities. We know of the big successful ones like the Etruscans, the Latins, the Venite are well recorded. But there were other, smaller groups as well that probably weren't even really ethnic groups. They were just tribal groups, and little clans who managed to remain independent up until the time of the Roman conquest. So I've been very interested in this question of where. How did these groups come about? Because if you go back far enough in time. You cannot see them in the archaeological record. The artifacts that people used. The pottery that they made. The houses that they built. Several hundred years before he Roman Conquest. All looked very homogeneous across the entire peninsula. And so, there has been a tendency in the scholarship recently to say that these groups are artificial constructions. That they came about, the Greeks gave these peoples names. And the Romans helped cement their separate identity. Really just in opposition to the threat of the Romans. I'm taking a different tack in my research, which is to say there has to be some core of truth. In the sense there must be more to these groups than just an artificial construction imposed by an outsiders. They must have had a sense of self-identity. So I'm looking for those groups far back in the archaeological record. That is far back in the past, 1,000 years before Rome conquers them and effectively wipes them out. And I'm looking for them just using the materials that they left behind. Because there are no texts in this period that I look for them in, which is the Bronze Age. So to do this, I recorded all these what I'm calling exotica, these foreign objects that have entered Italy, in this critical period of a few hundred years in the late Bronze Age. And I map out their distributions. I was able using social network analysis to reconstruct based on these distributions of these luxury goods regional groupings that you cannot see in any other aspect of the archaeology. But you can see it in the movement of these goods. And so, on the maps I've identified these regional groups, which when placed against the later named ethnic groups at the time of the Roman conquest. Some can be matched up very neatly indeed. So, my argument is that 1,000 years before the Roman conquest. There were already in Italy communities of people who felt that they belonged together, and recognized each other as such. And it's out of those communities in certain regions that come the named ethnic groups that the Romans faced much later. It's a process that is called path dependence. Where you feel a connection to a particular group of people. So you keep interacting with them over and over, and over again. And that intensifies your sense of affiliation and connection and eventually we're talking about an ethnic group. A group that people always are curious about is the Etruscans because their origins remain a great mystery to a lot of scholars. But I think that I can see, at least back in the late Bronze Age. The presence, towards the end of the Bronze Age, 1200 to 1000 BC. The emergence of a group in the region that will become the heartland of the Etruscans. And, it's a, so in the, when I'm detecting it. I would not call it an ethnic group. I'm seeing a network of interaction in place in Southern Italy. That is, doesn't encompass what later will be the entire Etruscan homeland. But I think is the kernel of what will eventually become the Etruscans. So where does that group come from?

[@Lion718]

pottery made by the Mycenaean Greeks on the Greek mainland that was shipped in considerable quantities all around the Eastern Mediterranean and in lesser quantities but still notable amounts to as far as Italy and even a few pieces have gone as far as Spain but for our purposes what's interesting is where those Mycenaean pots end up in Italy because the the Greeks who brought them would almost certainly have just left them along the coast they would have come by boat and deposited them they were there so any pieces that reach Inland or have traveled overland almost certainly by local Italians not by by Greeks.

[@lorenzodeluca8530]

Proof of Dionysus of Halicarnassus description of the dispersal of the Pelasgians? Pelasgian is the later Hellenic exonym for the people who due to their wolf symbolisms should be called the Lyki or the Lukka. Hence Lucca in Tuscany settled in the RBA. Lucania (see Bradano valley RBA settlements) and the she-wolf myth. Rome was nourished by people associated with wolves (see myth of King Lycaon father of Oenotrus)

[@sl1763]

Sure enjoyed your excellent presentation very much. Wish now to find one on the Ligurians.

[@historydome]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@SuspensionOfDisbelief]

👍

[@LindaMerchant-pm8vn]

Rome is of Italy always was always will be the Romans became the predominant Italian culture

[@sl1763]

So are the Tuscans, Ligurians. Lombards and Veneti and so many more. Some ethnically so different from “Romans”.